Unknown Killer, Maker, Protector
by Calebkir
Summary: Memories are like glass, seen through and easily forgotten. Rated M for language.


**Disclaimer:**

**I own no part of the HP Universe, nor do I make money off of this, nor do I want to say I want to for fear of rabid, bloodsucking lawyers. **

Do you know my name?

If you do, I'd like you to tell me.

Now the next question is: Do you know of me?

If you are among the rich and/or powerful, you probably do. Ditto for the lowest, most desperate of men. I am the person you see in the TV, hell, I'm on there now. Just turn to channel 13. See me there? No, I'm not the guy in the front, making the world shattering speech. Nor am I the suit-wearing bodyguard off to his left. Look further back.

That small, almost unnoticeable space in between the curtains is where you'll find me, waiting for the right moment. That moment that defines history. The moment where one becomes as infamous as the current, (possibly dead, I don't keep up with the news much), Dark Lord, or a savior the likes of the supposed Boy-Who-Didn't-Die.

So now we turn to the final question: Why am I, a person with no name, that is known by rich and poor alike doing standing behind a curtain flipping an old knife? I've already given you the answer.

And there it is: comprehension dawns on you as you watch the scene unfold on the TV. You watch in horror as a man interrupts the speechmaker for just a second before the lights go out. A woman screams, a man curses and a lot of voices yelling for people to drop to the floor fill your televisions' speakers as chaos erupts.

Less than a minute goes by before the lights are turned back on, and a gruesome sight is laid before you. The speechmaker is lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

Now, before you go and curse me, let me tell you it's not his blood. No, the previous owner of the nearly five liters of blood that the speechmaker is lying in is that of the one who interrupted him moments before the lights were killed.

I know what you're thinking: That's a lot of blood for one person to be spilled over such a short period of time. My answer to this conundrum is of course, simple. Cut two major arteries, say, the radial and the carotid, and you too can spill almost all your blood in less than a minute.

The next question that runs through your mind is: Why? Why did I kill him? I don't even have to say anything, just point to the ten pounds of plastic explosive tied around the mans chest and the detonator in his hand to answer that one. Now I know this will shock you, but I know your next question, and before you even think it… No, I couldn't take the detonator away from him, Yes, I had to kill him. Why? Because I take threats against my life very serious.

Imagine for a second what would have happened if he managed to set that vest off. I would die, the speechmaker would die, hell, even the cat on the 3rd floor would die. Everything in the… wherever we are… would die. You don't go against something like that and talk your way out. The people who do such things are nutters, and as such they can't be talked out of their suicidal tendencies, ESPECIALLY if I am involved.

Now that is a question we should consider: Why am I involved with this? Easy. I was hired to.

So now your brain shifts gears and you start to think a little. I know… It hurts. Deal with the pain. Oh, and don't mind the smoke either, that's just useless brain cells coming back to life. It starts coming up with answers somewhere along the lines of mercenary, bodyguard, and other such for hire people. You would be right, and I am the best at what I do.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, lets examine some of the more passive statements I have made. Mind you, this will make your head hurt getting it to wrap around the notions I am about to produce, and any grinding noise you here is natural, I swear.

First: The would-be assassin could not be talked out of what he was doing. I'll give you this one, don't say I never gave you anything: He was being controlled. How was he being controlled? By the look of his eyes before he died, I'd say by wand and word, and that is why I am involved.

I am a magic user. No, I won't say witch or wizard, nor will you hear me utter the word "muggle". Labels mean almost nothing to me, and if I were to say I was any of those it would probably insult me or the species that calls themselves that. No, I don't have a short shiny stupid stick up my sleeve. I have several wooden nails, and while useful, are utter crap at channeling magic. In fact I rarely, if ever, use my magic on the job, the exceptions being Summoning, Banishing, Vanishing, Disillusionment and Silencing. Useful for summoning electrical fuses so that assassins die in darkness and I get none of the credit/blame. Also useful for getting rid of blood that splatters on me, and my life usually depends on not being heard and/or seen.

Now, I know that sparked a million other questions in that now moving brain of yours, and we will get to quite a few of them, but I will first state that I will not tell you everything. Something's people just have to find out for themselves or the answers make no sense. Take, for instance, the wooden nails. Why do I have them? They were given to me by a priest in Rome, Italy where two others where I partially recovered from a nasty altercation involving ten Bad Guys, two House-elves, fifty plus Non-Combatants, four Veela, and a magical blast that was felt in Australia. Or so I'm told, for I have no memory of anything that occurred on or before that incident.

And that brings us to the answer to the question of why I am writing this.

Two words: I'm not.

Let me explain. I have three friends in this world. Three individuals I would die for, and give a hefty discount to kill for. Two of them were in the same explosion I was in, and the other… well… that story is strange and not part of the answers I'm willing to give right now. One of them happens to be a spell crafter, and a rather talented one at that. It was she who convinced me to try this spell that it might help the three of us find out who we were.

Think it would be easy to print our pictures in the papers and ask people who we were? Well, considering we had 3rd degree burns over 90% of our bodies, no. It was almost a guessing game on who was male and female at the time, and with the backlash erasing all of our memories…

Another problem came in the fact that spells used to identify people went haywire. I remember one time one caused the end table to turn into a white goat-like thing, which promptly went pop, exploding what looked like liquid chocolate all over the nice sterile room.

Still, another problem came with our treatment. Since we had no memories (and I mean none, we didn't even know how to talk or walk) of who we were and were, without numbing charms and pain relief potions, in constant, agonizing pain, the healer at the time decided to try an experimental treatment. She gave us each a dose of Extremely Experimental Polyjuice. This potion was a modification of the original potion in that it was "supposed" to be permanent. It was.

Too bad they couldn't identify us before hand.

And the fact they used hairs from random non-magical people was just incredible.

I'll say this once, I'll say this loud and proud. Don't forget it, I'll not say it again.

SOME PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID!

So we come to this spell, which happens to write down our thoughts for a set length of time. We then put it here, in an internationally accredited magazine dealing with the mysteries of magic in the hopes that we will be able to find our old identities through our thought patterns, or find someone with a neat trick they haven't gotten around to publishing to help us.

I say old, because we have moved on, and plan to keep our current identities. But that's not to say we wouldn't like it if we had some family out there.

Before you ask, yes, we tried going the DNA route, but that was halted quite quickly when we found the E.E.P. not only gave us the looks of three random people, but their DNA as well. Imagine our shock.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was getting into some more back story before we delve into the here and now.

Flash back ten years ago.

My first memory is mostly of white. White sheets, white gown, white walls, funny old guy in a white hat, you get the picture. This old man had a kind voice, and talked continuously. I couldn't understand him at first, and I couldn't move or speak so I had to listen to him drone on for hours about… well… whatever he was talking about. Finally, he noticed I was awake.

"John," he said pointing at himself, at which point he continued to talk. For a few hours every day, when I wasn't doped up on what seemed to be an entire pharmacy, he came to my bed and talked.

Slowly, I began to understand him, but considering my condition was a badly burned person who couldn't move, I couldn't ask him questions. Hell, I couldn't even acknowledge he beyond blinking. I learned about the explosion that happened in Britain, and how I was one of three survivors. According to him, the blast leveled the British Ministry of Morons… err… Magic, and with my memory erased, (not to mention my body burned beyond all recognition) it was unknown whether me and the other two were involved as victims, or instigators.

Afterwards, the Vatican got wind of it, and had us ship to them, where the finest healers in the world were working on us. Not that it helped much.

Let us pause in this for a second while I give a late, but entirely needed, disclaimer. I am not sane. You wouldn't be either if you rarely stayed in one body for more than a few days, as I tend to drink Polyjuice like a normal person's wake up tea. I also have a healthy disrespect for those people that used to call themselves lawmakers in Britain. I say used to, because they were there, at ground zero, when the incident happened. May god have as much mercy on them as he does me.

After a few months in the care of the church, it was decided to use the E.E.P.. By that time, I had mastered whatever language they spoke to me, and even picked up some interesting words from janitors assigned to clean my room at night. Not that I could speak a lick of it at the time, as the ten percent of my body that wasn't burned was my lower back.

They tried to explain it to me using terms more suited to a daycare center then a hospital, and then force-fed it to me.

Now I've heard that regular Polyjuice is an uncomfortable experience, but this was worse than the time the attendant in charge of my pain relieving potions let them run out because she had a "date". Every part of my body twisted and surge, and by the time it was done, I was screaming my new vocal cords raw. After quite a few numbing, cheering and calming charms, I looked at the person who administered what I dubbed, Pain in a Bottle.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Now, I don't really remember what I said, but John gave me the toned down version of it later. Basically, I told the man who administered the E.E.P. I was going to eviscerate him and castrate him with his own entrails.

I heard the other two gave similar threats.

It was sometime after we had grown accustomed to our "new" bodies that we realized something rather disturbing, namely the plans for our use.

Now, I hate to throw tar at a supposedly good group, but these guys made me sick.

Apparently, we were "chosen" by "god" to carry out his "will". The three of us read between the lines, as it were, and realized that they were going to make us into assassins for the church, all in the name of god of course.

What a crock of shit.

And with that came the training.

Now I am not going into too much detail on the training, as it is boring as hell, and honestly, you don't need to know. I will say however that me, Whim, and Pro decided that we should get some training while it was free, then opt out. By opt out I mean run. Far, fast and with much prejudice to any who stood in our way.

It was during one night after an especially grueling training session that John came to my room, and spoke to me in soft, hurried tones. This struck me as odd. He told me that they were planning on conditioning us mentally for the job, and not in a nice way. He said they reasoned we only had a few months of memory, which they could easily erase, and program in all sorts of nasty things I won't go into.

He finished by handing me three small wooden sticks telling me they were going to start the next morning, and it would behoove me and the others to get out. As he walked out the door, he muttered about a box kept near a certain pillar that he believed was unguarded.

Now, I am not what you would call a proactive person. I am more comfortable dealing with problems than creating them, and I had just found the biggest one of my short life: How to run away from one of the most powerful and spread out organizations in the world and stay away.

I gathered my companions and we raced through the halls, knocking over guards, setting off alarms, and generally causing as much chaos as we could amongst the confused guards.

We made our way quickly to the indicated pillar, and didn't even bother to stop as I scooped up the box. Now running full tilt towards the front doors and freedom, all we had going for us was trust in a man, hope in our hearts and a box filled with who knew what.

Ok, that sounded corny. Experiencing it felt even cornier.

When we finally exited the compound, we didn't look back, nor did we stop to gawk at the city that was Rome. We just ran, turning at every corner, until we had to finally stop, not because we were lost or tired, but because we had made so many turns we were actually quite dizzy.

So, there we were, sitting in an alley, about to open the box, when hesitation and doubt first started rearing their ugly head. The other two were looking at me in askance as I clung protectively onto the box. With some smooth talking I let one of them open the box, as I was unwilling to let my last hope die, not to mention the last link to the only one who actually knew of me as I was. I was emotional, so sue me.

Inside the box was a letter, three vials of different colored liquid, and three sets of identification papers/passports. Reading the letter, we found that we had three single doses of E.E.P., and paperwork to match; all we had to do was take them and disappear.

It was at this time we decided to split up, and meet back here in a year, mostly to pool information and see if we could find out who we were. How we would identify ourselves is we tore the letter into thirds, and that would be how we confirmed each other was who we said we were. We did this because we thought at the time that secrecy was in our favor, and we needed to keep it that way, even from each other. We each took a bottle, and the corresponding papers, and walked our separate ways, none of us looking back.

My current identity is Ghost.

Wait for it.

There you are. Now you know of me. Yes, I am the guard you read about in the news a while back who selflessly threw himself (and his car) into the path of a moving lorry that was on a collision course with a wealthy client. I'm also the one who beat the holy hell out of the one guy for attacking a mafia witness. Oh, and that one corporate prick that was found hanging in his home after it was discovered he was stealing millions from trusting employee's?

Yep. Me.

Okay, time for more smoke and gear grinding, I'm about to derail this train. Different looking people did those three incidents, and one of them wasn't a guy either.

Oh shit, I forgot to mention something didn't I? Because of the "Incident" and the E.E.P., it seems that regular Polyjuice; to us three anyway, is now permanent.

I had done some thinking after we split, and I figured the powerful people in the world would know something, or, at least, know someone who could find out. But how to get close to them? The solution came when I saw the security in an airport, and I realized that everyone needed security, and the people I was most interested in talking to would need a more personal touch.

So, here I am. A magic user with an Identity of Ghost, who can't be identified by blood, sight, or magic, playing body guard to the rich and the influential, and you're wondering what the hell can anyone do to recover my former life? After years of searching and asking all the right (and wrong) questions to everyone I could, I believe nothing can be done, but Whim thinks someone out there can help.

This is also the same person that stole a Nuke, took it apart, put it back together, and detonated it off the coast of Antarctica.

Yes, she's nuts.

Yes, Whim, you are.

Yes, I know I am not the poster boy for sanity myself.

Yes, I am done, so now you can go on about you're so called methods for discovering whom we were. I'd honestly like to hear it myself, if not for information purposes, then for the entertainment value.


End file.
